BoringFilms ART Helsinki'09

Lauren Moffatt

David — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:31:09 +0000

was born in Armidale, Australia in 1982. After studying at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney she relocated to Berlin, Germany, where she has been based since 2005. Completing a number of multi-media projects in Germany, Australia, Ukraine and France, Lauren has been active as a video artist, painter and installation artist interested in human perception and mass media since 2003.

Waterseller – Lauren Moffatt (DE)

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:26:02 +0000

Waterseller is both the documentation of a happening staged within Berlin’s Pergamon Museum in 2007 and an experiment in perceptual narrative technique and Photoshop animation. The film presents a young woman singing in front of one of the museum’s exhibits, a giant religious altar from Ancient Greece reassembled inside one of the museum halls, while oblivious museum-goers mill about in the background listening to their audio tours.

The film was shot with two cameras. Using Photoshop, the footage was later combined frame-by-frame into single images as a replica of the way the two eyes work together in visual perception. The result is a film that presents not only a scene, but also a fictional person’s perception of that scene: the failed Situationist happening, dwarfed by it’s spectacular backdrop and silenced by consumerist static.

Crystal (loop) – Gareth Spor (USA)

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:05:32 +0000

Crystal Loop (Pollyanna) is a brief video loop with audio. The video and audio are modified appropriated clips from the 1960 Disney film, Pollyanna, concerning a young girl who brightens the lives of a town’s gloomy citizenry. The scene we see in this video is of the main character producing a rainbow on a wall by dangling a piece of cut glass in a window and the bewildered responses of herself and an older woman. The loop in question is the conceptual loop that occurs when one produces a phenomenon, observes that phenomenon and is then put into another mind-state as a result. It is a feedback loop where one’s consciousness creates a form in order to alter itself. It is both the subject of my artwork as well as a reflection of my artistic practice.

Gareth Spor

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:46:30 +0000

GARETH SPOR (b. 1977, England) grew up in the United States. He holds a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley where he studied the neurophysiology of the retina. Currently he has just completed his masters degree at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His artwork surrounds ideas of the cosmos both outside of an inside of ourselves.

Nelly-Eve Rajotte

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:31:26 +0000

Nelly-Eve Rajotte lives and works in Montreal. She has been a member of Perte de Signal since 2003. In 2006, she obtained an M.F.A. in visual and media arts at UQAM. She works in single-track digital video, installation and sound art. Her videos have been seen in various festivals in Canada, the United States, South America and Europe. In Montreal, her installations have been exhibited at Parisian Laundry, Fonderie Darling, the Occurrence gallery, the Clark gallery and Sat Gallery. She was taking part in Taid08 and Transmedial video selection 07.

Nelly-Ève Rajotte’s images in motion bear witness to a research centered on the concept of duality. Images are generally split or superimposed before melting again into another frame. The artist transforms the images she seizes, reducing them to their formal components, altering them through the modulation of captured lighting, compressing them at times into horizontal bands. A play on form progressively stretches across the surface of the screen, allowing us to follow the modification of the images colligated from reality by the artist. The original motif is at times indistinguishable by the eye, but retained by the memory, which brings us to the underlying process of metamorphosis. The image’s architecture is thus somewhat visible and the juxtaposed soundtrack follows a similar motion. Sound patches crackle or adopt a sinister tone, tracing a destabilizing perceptive journey and creating an accumulation of impressions. The artist utilizes different translations and succeeds in transporting images from one space to another – a perspective, a self-portrait, a train hall, a city…

Rivi – Nelly-Eve Rajotte (CA)

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:29:51 +0000

Fixed plan of an esplanade under the rain, transparencies, lines and texture correspond to create image-sound correlation. The video assembly is built from juxtaposed fixed plan has ‘images error’ on which lines takes shape. The sound screen suggests a significant space quasi tactile in resonance with the edited images.

5min 08, Canada, stereo, PAL,2009

OPENED – Jay Needham (USA)

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:21:44 +0000

I dug out my old stamp collection and remembered that it was not really mine, but someone else’s. It consists of a shoe box of loose stamps from around the world, cancelled and therefore of no value to the real collector. I kept it through the years though, somehow protected it and also began to imagine a correspondence, a fiction that spoke about travel using my own footage, writings and sounds.
The piece is a continuation of the work that started with 13 buildings and features spare recounting of a monolouge left on an answering machine. OPENED relates to 13 buildings, but neither is the first in the series. The sounds gathered for this piece are of Spring rainstoms in Southern Illinois.

Jay Needham

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:33:49 +0000

Jay Needham is an artist, radio producer and composer whose sound and visual works are often concerned with the politics of borders and acts of listening. Although he primarily centers his creative and critical practice on radio and the transmission arts, screenings of his video series on memory and architecture have appeared at festivals and conferences worldwide. 13 Buildings premiered at the 9th. Videomedeja in Serbia with additional screenings at the Sydney Opera House during d/art 2006. The series has been distributed by the Centre for Art and Technology, Finland on the DVD Flux Vol.1 and Vol. 2. The second installment titled OPENED screened at the VIBGYOR Film Festival in Kerala India and during the Simultan Video and New Media Art Festival in Timisoara, Romania.
His radio documentary Listening at the Border was a special presentation during Sonic Interventions at The University of Amsterdam in 2005. Broadcast on numerous NPR stations in the United States, the work traces several years in the life of an NSA sound spy. Additional programming events include Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and during Radiotesla as a part of War, at Tesla im Podewils Palais, Berlin, Germany.
Other works include his micro radio work There and Back performed and aired as a part of Particle/Wave during Pixel Ache 2005 at The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the recently installed Tell Us Your Secrets during Waves, curated by RIXC and Armin Medosch at The Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga 2006.
A Slow Crash, his narrative work for radio, aired and streamed as a part of New Media Scotland’s Resonant Cities program and was released on Deep Wireless II in 2005 by New Adventures in Sound Art.
Jay is a frequent collaborator with The Association Panamericana para la Concervacion, a rainforest conservation NGO based in The Republic of Panama.
Writings and selections of his sound works will be published in 2007 in Hearing Places edited by Ros Bandt. Cambridge Scholars Press. (In press)
He is currently producing, researching and composing a radio feature on his family’s relation to the origins of the atomic bomb. A live FM performance of that work will premiere in Brussels in October during The Radiophonic Biennale. Needham holds an MFA from The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts. Jay teaches courses in Sonic Arts, in the Department of Radio–Television, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.